


Academic Classification

by StarlingGirl



Category: Warcraft (2016)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 06:58:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12812133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlingGirl/pseuds/StarlingGirl
Summary: It was probably adrenaline.Adrenaline and the pure thrill of still being alive; that had been what had driven lips to press against lips. Shame about what happened after. That, Khadgar could only blame on panic.





	Academic Classification

**Author's Note:**

> Just something I found lying around on tumblr, and tidied up a little. Keep an eye out; I'm feeling fic-y, and this might get a second part in due course.

“What  _is_ it?”

It’s a question Khadgar himself would have framed, if Lothar hadn’t managed to get to it first.

They’re backing away from it - the thing - all bulging limbs and dully glistening skin and malformed armour. Lothar’s sword is drawn, raised. Khadgar’s fingers are twitching rapidly, lips stumbling silently over themselves. They might not know what it is, but they’re neither of them fool enough to think it might want to engage in conversation or friendly debate on the subject.

It’s not a troll, though it has the bulk of one. It’s not an orc, though it’s got the height, the sickly and unnatural colouring of something fel-touched. It’s as though some enterprising person, finding not enough horror in any one species, had cherry-picked the worst of all of them, and thrown them into an over-sized melting pot.

The thing growls, a rumbling that Khadgar can feel in his bones.

“I don’t think now is the time for academic classification,” Khadgar says. Lothar opens his mouth - for some dry retort, no doubt - and then closes it again. Khadgar tallies it up as a victory. He’ll take the time to celebrate later.

Before he can muse too much on Lothar’s uncharacteristic speechlessness, the thing raises a warhammer that looks like it could level buildings. It’s at Khadgar’s eye level - no, it’s not staring at you, he tells himself, this inanimate object - and he’s so busy watching it apprehensively that he doesn’t see the thing’s other hand until too late.

Lazily, almost like it’s swatting a fly at a picnic, a beastly hand brushes Lothar aside. It’s as if the man - not large, but solid, and in full plate to boot - weighs nothing. The sound of him hitting the wall is a crunch that Khadgar prays is the failure of wooden beams or the compression of armour, rather than the snapping of bones.

His hands fly up. The incandescence of his magic flares against his pale skin. He’s halfway through a word when the hammer begins its arc. It’s deceptively fast. Almost backed up against the wall as he is, he has no choice but to duck, bringing him under the hammer and almost into the creature’s embrace.

The spell-words have stumbled, and his magic is slipping away. He grasps for it, panic-stricken, because the thing is confused by his sudden proximity but growing angry, and he’s alone and he hasn’t heard Lothar move or even groan from where he’d crumpled on the floor like a rag doll and –

                               – the blade almost takes his eyes out as it emerges from between bones, through muscle, puncturing through the creature’s skin. He finds time, in between the jack-rabbit beats of his heart, to wonder that Lothar’s sword is long enough to pierce through creature back-to-front with inches to spare, sharp enough to cleave through muscle and skin so easily. Then he notices with faint anxiety that despite the sword very obviously stuck through its meaty torso, its demeanour doesn’t appear to have changed. This creature considers the wound a minor inconvenience at best – if it’s even noticed at all.

Lothar grunts – when had he pushed himself up from the floor? The man can move like a cat when he wants to, even in all that armour – and the blade twists, wringing black-brown blood from the wound that doesn’t so much flow as ooze. Then it retreats altogether.

Khadgar remembers himself. Magic dances at his fingertips once more, brushed by the fetid and all-too close breath of the creature. Confusion, he suspects, is the only reason he hasn’t been snapped in two. It seems to take just as long for the creature to process thoughts as to register pain.

His spell hits at the same moment that Lothar’s sword thrusts through the creatures’s jugular by way of its spine. Safe to say, it would be hard for even the dumbest of creatures to fail to register the joint attack. There’s a gargle, blood welling up in the creature’s throat, and then the flailing starts. It’s death in slow-motion, and it’s not pretty. Khadgar has the foresight to stumble away as the bloated body begins to topple.

He stares down at it and everything – the fear, the terror, the relief, the victory – all hit him at once. It’s like drunkenness arriving all in one go – a sort of giddiness mixed with wooziness mixed with elation.

Looking up at Lothar, he finds a breathless, gore-spattered man resting on his sword, head down and bent at the waist, as if he’s just sprinted a mile. When he straightens, there’s a line of his own blood tracking from his hair, the bright crimson looking somehow healthy in contrast with the black and viscous blood of the beast.

Khadgar circles the thing, lets out a hoarse sort of victory cry, and reaches out to Lothar’s shoulder, anchoring themselves to the shoulder plates. He’s almost holding the man’s neck, instead, but Lothar doesn’t seem to mind. The soldier lets out a breath of almost disbelieving laughter, and Khadgar can hear the same tremble of relief in it that he himself feels tickling the back of his throat.

“I know what it is,” he announces, punch-drunk on the rush of adrenaline.

Lothar raises his brows. “What?”

“ – dead.” Khadgar laughs at his own joke –  _terrible, awful_ – but Lothar laughs too, so that’s alright.

He doesn’t even think about it. His other hand comes around to catch the soldier’s face, and he slams their lips together with a complete lack of finesse or forethought.

Lothar’s surprised by it, hands hovering halfway to nowhere. It’s nothing to how surprised he is when Khadgar abruptly pulls back – panicked, outraged – and punches him in the face.

Lothar curses, loud, stumbling back with a hand over his nose. Khadgar’s hands fly up to cover his mouth.

“I – I am so sorry.” Lothar straightens, incredulously checks his fingers for blood. There’s none, which is a small mercy in Khadgar’s eyes.

“What are you doing?” he demands, wildly, and his fingers probe the bridge of his nose. When he winces, Khadgar winces too. Half sympathy, half horrified embarrassment.

“I don’t know,” he whispers from behind his hands. “I don’t know, I’m so sorry, I just – everything was so – but then I just – and realised –”

He approaches Lothar, reaches out as if to steady him. Lothar swats his hands away.

“Are you insane? Next time, I’ll let you get eaten!”

It’s long minutes before they both calm down – two men bickering like children in the shadow of a still-warm monster’s corpse.

Khadgar says, flush high on his cheeks, that it must have been the adrenaline, the post-battle rush. Lothar agrees sullenly that yes, it must have been that.

And later, in the taproom, Khadgar blanches when he hears someone demand the story of Lothar’s black eye. Lothar casts him a look before he recounts the story dramatically for the benefit of his men who are present, the loose crowd of onlookers and drinkers. He paints them the picture of the beast, its ugly shape and its incredible strength, of a heroic defeat by sword and spell.

    “And that’s how you got the black eye?” someone asks, awed.

“No,” Lothar says, and Khadgar’s gaze shoots back up, surprised when Lothar tips his head back towards him. “After all that, this jumped-up little spell-chucker punched me in the face.”

It draws laughter, surprised, a buzz of conversation and a clutch of gazes turned in his direction. Khadgar can feel colour rising in his cheeks, spreading across right up to the tips of his ears. He’s half expecting Lothar to reveal the other half of his adrenaline-fuelled actions, too, but instead Lothar just winks, drains the last of his drink.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” he says, brushing off the rest of the questions, the clamouring demands for more stories. Incredible, Khadgar thinks, how easily Anduin Lothar commands the respect and the love of the people around him, and yet seems to remain almost entirely oblivious of just how much he matters to them. “I’ll ache badly enough in the morning without adding a night of drinking to my troubles.”

Khadgar follows him out of the door, because there’s no other reason he’d been in the taproom in the first place; he certainly hadn’t been there to drink. He’d just been there because Lothar hadn’t brushed him off yet, because Khadgar is just as susceptible as the rest of Stormwind to the man’s indefinable pull.

“I am sorry,” Khadgar mumbles, as he catches up. “About –”

His loose gestures seems to encompass both of them, rather than just the darkening bruise extending from the bridge of Lothar’s nose, the ring of it beneath his eye.

“Don’t you worry. I’ll pay it back in kind, some day.”

Khadgar winces. He doesn’t doubt a punch from Anduin Lothar would feel like hitting a stone wall face-first at high speed. He’s distracted enough by the thought to only belatedly hear the man’s _I suppose now is as good a time as any_ , and he uses his split second’s notice to brace himself before –

– before there’s lips on his, pressing a little less hard and a little less desperate than had his own, hours earlier. They’re gone in an instant. Khadgar blinks, lifts his fingers to his mouth.

“What was that?” he asks, faintly. Lothar rolls a shoulder, tucks something like a smirk against his teeth, and turns to go. Khadgar catches his words over his shoulder as he leaves. Dry, a little mocking, but not unkind.

“I don’t think now is the time for academic classification.”

 

 


End file.
